Football Manager Live Preview

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We go pitchside for Sports Interactive's big announcement.

By Steve Hill

Football Manager is one of those games that you either entirely ignore, or slavishly devote every spare minute of your life to. A regular fixture on the gaming calendar, it comes out on the same Friday each year to widespread acclaim from a legion of hollow-eyed addicts. So when developer Sports Interactive invited the gaming (and football) press to its new East London office for "the most important announcement since Football Manager," speculation was rife.

Shrouded in secrecy since its inception, even former Liverpool and Ireland midfielder Ray Houghton - a tactical consultant at SI - revealed that he still hadn't told his kids about it. But as the assembled hacks gorged themselves on pie, chips and beer while watching the 1984 FA Cup Final, the clever money was on a massively multiplayer online football management game.

Never the most attractive game, it's all going on under the bonnet.

As usual, the clever money was right. Football Manager Live takes the match engine and database from Football Manager and melds them to a multiplayer world that is described as a cross between Football Manager, fantasy football and eBay (other auction sites are available). With each game world hosting a thousand managers, while the players are real, the clubs are completely fictional. Points and cash are awarded through various means and the idea is to be the top manager in your particular world.

The brainchild of Oliver Collyer - the younger of the two brothers who coded the original Championship Manager in their bedroom - the idea allegedly came to him while taking some time out travelling. Realistically, there was no great Eureka moment, and as he freely admits, "It was something that was always likely at some point, an online version of some kind, of the game. The obvious way to do it would be to take what is Football Manager now, keep the same format and make it online. But I was thinking that's almost too obvious, too predictable. It's also been shown to have failed in some other examples and I think it was a case of why has it failed?"

Probably the most high profile failure in recent years was the disastrous Sky Sports Football Manager, which proved a financial black hole. If one of the biggest sports networks on the planet couldn't pull it off, what hope is there for the rest? But as Collyer says, "Surely there's a market, there's an interest and a lot of fun to be had in this kind of game, so what's the formula for it? There was a realisation over time that maybe it needs to be a little bit different, maybe we need to take a different approach to it and emphasise the live play. An online football management game has surely got to be about playing your opponent at the same time and trying to outwit him. So let's take that and let's build the game around that, and let's see how we can fit a game around that. And that might mean that we deviate quite substantially from FM, it becomes nothing like FM in terms of leagues and competitions, but then so be it."

A rare example of French comedy with this prophetic team name.

Playing your opponent at the same time was a problem that blighted the Sky Sports game, as anyone who logged on for the pre-arranged fixture to be greeted by virtual tumbleweed will confirm. The key difference in Football Manager Live is that fixtures are flexible, and can be played in any order prior to a resolution date, after which the AI will take over. So if you spot one of your opponents online, you can send him a quick message and be up and playing in minutes, which is another key factor.

As Collyer recalls, "When we used to play the FM game in the office, I think the most fun times we had was when it was a network game, but it was always very, very frustrating. The actual time you spent getting a lot of enjoyment out of it was always largely outweighed by the waiting times."